An Idaho Woman on Mars

BY HAILEY MINTON

Kelly Lively and her team fuel, test and deliver Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators to power space exploration, including the Perseverance Rover that recently landed on Mars.

Kelly Lively was the project manager for the nuclear power system onboard the Perseverance Rover in the Mars 2020 mission. She and her Radioisotope Power Systems team help bring power to places where the sun doesn’t shine. The rover landed on the red planet on Feb. 18, 2020 and has begun carrying out its mission to seek signs of ancient life, and collect and cache samples of rock and soil. The landing site was chosen because the area shows evidence of water, and answers to Mars’ ability to sustain life may lie in the soil. Perseverance is the second of a three-mission strategy that will eventually bring soil samples back to earth for further study. This mission brings humanity one step closer to sending people to Mars.

Kelly and her team are a part of Idaho National Laboratory. INL has a partnership with NASA to provide nuclear power systems that enable deep space exploration. Today, they use Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (MMRTGs). This same technology enjoys a decades-long history. Early power systems were used in the late ‘70s to send Voyagers 1 and 2 into space. They continue to send information back to earth 50-plus years later. Curiosity Rover,which landed on Mars in 2012, and Perseverance rover’s power systems that are an updated version use the same technology. Kelly and her team embarked on their journey to assemble and test this generator five years before they delivered it to NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center for mating to Perseverance Rover which launched July 30, 2020, for it’s seven-month journey to Mars.

Kelly Lively talks to team members.

Photos courtesy of Idaho National Laboratory.

MMRTGs create energy by converting the heat from the decay of plutonium into electricity. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 87 years, meaning in 87 years it will emit half the amount of heat it did when the radioactive isotope was first manufactured. The generator is designed to have a 14-year mission life at a specific electrical-power level. Even though it will generate power for decades, NASA plans for specific mission goals over a specific amount of time.

Kelly’s journey to manager of the Radioisotope Power Systems Department was greatly influenced by her first job after high school. She grew up and graduated from the same high school her father attended in Illinois before she and her family moved to Idaho. Her mother was a bookkeeper, and Kelly’s plan was to follow in her footsteps and become a CPA. Her aunt and uncle, who lived in Idaho, suggested she get a job at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, as it was called at that time.

As the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, Idaho National Laboratory is one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories with roughly 5,000 scientists, engineers and support personnel. At INL’s three primary facility areas–the Advanced Test Reactor Complex, Materials and Fuels Complex, and Research and Education Campus–researchers work to fulfill DOE’s mission to “discover the solutions to power and secure America’s future.”

Kelly followed her aunt and uncle’s advice and started working at INL in 1983. As a secretary for Newport News Reactor Services at the Naval Reactor Training Facility at INEL, she typed procedures for engineers to overhaul and re-fuel nuclear reactors on nuclear submarine prototypes. It captured her interest and she could sense unforeseen opportunities at INL. “There were so many interesting projects and research happening around me. I was overwhelmed with information and it was very inspirational work,”Kelly said. “It wasn’t that the work I was doing wasn’t important, but I wanted to contribute to something more technical.” From that point on,she was always looking for opportunities to increase her experience and pay.

She is so well-respected by everyone at the lab and works hard to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Accepting a job at the Material and Fuels Complex, she quickly moved from typing procedures, to processing security clearances, and on to her first technical job as a quality control inspector. Inspecting materials put her in closer contact with engineers, which further heightened her interest. “I had maxed out my ability to advance, so I decided to go to college,” she said. After attending five years of school, working the summers at INL to fund her education, and having two children, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Idaho State University in 1998. Kelly said her parents were very supportive of her and INL was a great place to work. She never felt like there were opportunities she couldn’t seize because she was a woman.

Based on the conversation I had with her, and the way her colleagues extolled her, I gathered a sense that she regularly interacts with others in a way that lifts them to reach their potential. “She is so well-respected by everyone at the lab and works hard to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers,” said Lori McNamara, INL media relations. The Perseverance project is behind Kelly now, yet there is still work ahead. Upcoming missions include Dragonfly, which will send a drone to Saturn’s moon, and perhaps Trident, which will send a spacecraft to Neptune’s moon. Her team will continue to power exploration where the sun doesn’t shine.